Weekly Trivia on Plastic: Plastic Bottles Turned into T-Shirt

Here is good news about recycling plastic bottles: when done right, they can be turned into T-Shirt! For green fashionistas who care about environment, this could be a new fashion line they want to take and be faithful for.

The polyester graphic T-shirt on the left was produced and designed by Brooklyn Industries. It feels soft just like normal T-shirts and it looks as cool. Who can seriously believe that this single tee was constructed of 14 recycled plastic bottles?

There is a downside of it, though. The polyester garment can’t be processed with the same normal recycling procedure at the end of its life. Unless it’s 100% polyester (stitching and tag included), it’s going to be a real challenge to turn this plastic tee into something else. Fortunately, companies like Rethink Fabrics are finding ways to tackle this problem, which hopefully could be realized soon.

However, wherever recycled plastic polyester fabric stands in the sustainable products, it is already offering one solution in plastic bottle recycling. With only less than 30% of plastic bottles recycled in the USA, this development on plastic T-shirt could hopefully change some people’s mind and habit about plastic bottle recycling. With more recycling awareness being spread around, the use of water or soda plastic bottles can be hoped to be reduced and recycled.

In the mean time until a solution is found on how to better recycle plastic fabric, we can always turn the used plastic fabrics into rags. At the very least you can collect your plastic bottles and separate them from the others so the recycling curb can process it into perhaps cooler T-shirts. Or if you feel like doing it (and have the time for it) some of these cool creative ways to reuse plastic bottles could be nice ideas.

Outdoor Hut Stores Drums with Hazardous Materials

It’s more often tricky than not when it comes to storing drums filled with hazardous materials. Outdoor hut helps keep them out of your plant for maximum protection.

It’s one-of-a-kind hut. Holding up to 8 drums of standard 48” x 48” pallets and a room for a worker to work on the drums, the hut is made of 100% polyethylene that is resistant to ultraviolet, harsh weathers and chemicals. It guarantees that the pallet doesn’t rust or corrode.

The hut is designed with twin double-wall doors and built-in 75 gallon sump to contain spills and leaks. There are 3 structural foam grates with the capability to support 8000 lbs. UDL. There are also molded-in vents to reduce fume and condensation build-up. Loading each drum is also a lot easier with the multi-purpose ramp. This ramp is lightweight and attaches easily and quickly to door opening.

Check out this Enpac Job outdoor storage if the nature of your business needs you to keep hazmat things in drums. It’ll be a big help in no time.

Drum Deheader Opens Closed Head Drums

When you think your closed head drums have reached the end of their lives, you can always reuse them for various useful things rather than sending them off to the landfills. One of them is to make storage alternative for your solid stuffs. All it takes is just drum deheader and good cleaning on the used drums.

As the name suggests, drum deheader is a tool that opens the top of closed-head drums. The manual drum deheader works similarly to the can opener used in the kitchen, only it’s much bigger and stronger.

There are some varieties of drum header that one can choose from. Some are cheap, some are expensive. It depends on the functions that each drum deheader offers. The electric drum deheader saves a lot of energy and time and is especially useful for a company that deheads numerous closed head drums. Check out our complete list here or click on the links below to the different drum deheaders offered at BayTec.

Vertical Slide Deheader | Ductile Iron Drum Deheader | Manual Drum Deheader
Non Sparking Drum Deheader | Wiz-Kid Ratchet Style Deheader | Wiz-Kid Economical Electric Drum Deheader
Replacement Cutting Wheels for Power Drum Deheader | Chime de Kinker | Deheader Tower
Stationary Fiber Drum Dechimer | Wizard Self-Propelled Drum Deheader

Repurposed Tins and Metal Jars

More and more people start to recycle these days. It’s a good sign towards better, cleaner, healthier future for our kids and grandchildren. In this blog post, we are going to talk about repurposed tins and metal cans and how to make use of these available, empty cans for other purposes.

You find them everywhere in the house. Soup cans, cat’s canned wet food, mint candies tins, etc. The question is what you do with the empty cans once the content is used. Typically we just throw them away to the rubbish bin. But what’s better to do is to give these empty cans a second life. Like some of these folks did.

Craft tool organizer

What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when we ask you what will you use your used cans for? The obvious one is really as a storage container. Turning the tins into storage container for craft tools, like color pencils, rulers, scissors, etc. is even a nicer idea. Look at the picture below from craftzine. Don’t you think the industrial look of these can organizers look awesome?

Can soap dispenser

Make your own soap dispenser! Out of empty cans. Follow the step-by-step instruction here and let us know how it goes. All you need are just a tin can, a small jar, epoxy, knife and a pump. Easy peasy.

Tin can pin cushion

Do you enjoy sewing? Then this cute handmade tin can pin cushion should interest you. It’s easy to make and it’s very useful to keep you pins together at the same place.

Wall container garden

This one is too cute. All it takes is just cleaning the tin cans real well, make holes for water drainage at the bottom and use them as wall planters. Amazing!

Tin can table numbers

What about DIY table numbers? They’re cheap, they’re easy to make and they’re not hurting the environment! Check out the link above and see if you can do it yourself.

Decorated metal tins

You want to do this whole metal tin reusing but you don’t really want to see the ugly labels when used as decorative things at home. Why not emboss the surface? Check this out to know how!

There are so many things that you can do with used metal tins and cans. As long as you have put your mind into repurposing them, you’ve already made yourselves one of the world’s recyclers. Why not use some of the ideas above or invent one of your own? You’ll definitely feel better afterwards!

Replace Paper Towels with Rags

It’s time to switch back to rags and forget about paper towels! Did you know that about 51,000 trees are cut down every day to produce paper towels in the United States only? And where do these paper towels end up? Yes, landfill. To pile and to wait for a long time to degrade themselves. So, rather than burdening our children with recycling all these wasted paper towels, let’s get back to the way it was before paper towels were invented. Let’s use rags!

The old good rags are as good – if not better – to clean messes compared to paper towels. Depending on the type of rags you’re using, they might even have higher absorbent power than paper towels, and more importantly they are reusable! All it takes is just rewash them after using, which can simply be done together with the rest of the household laundry. This simple act actually helps the environment AND saves us money in the long run.

Yes, we know that paper towel costs merely 5 dollars. But how many times do you have to clean and wipe something at home? Do you have young children? If you do, you might get even a lot more messes to clean with the rate of spilling and mouth-wiping things you have to deal with. Paper towels in this type of household could be very costly. However, change them with rags, and no more cost needed. Not even for detergent, considering you’re going to pour the same amount of detergent anyway when washing them together with the other clothes.

All that is real good reason to use rags instead of paper towels. We should all do it and save millions of trees annually from being cut down to make paper towels. Let’s do it!

How to Choose the Right Drum Handling Equipment

hydraulic drum handler

It is no secret that drum handling equipment gives so much ease in a plant whose activities involve many drums. From equipments as simple as drum cradles to something more complicated like drum lifters, drum handling equipments – when rightly chosen – bring effectiveness, provide more safety to the person who handle the drums and in the long run save much money. However, there is no point having drum handling equipment that doesn’t adequately address your plant’s needs, or whose functions exceed the normal activities. So how do we choose the right drum handling equipment for the workplace? Check out some tips below.

Look at the drum type and size in the plant

The first thing one needs to do before purchasing any type of drum handling equipment is to see what they’ve got in the plant. Do you have big drums or smaller ones? Are they of steel, plastic or fiber? Most drum handling equipment fits the work for steel barrels. Some work great for plastic and fiber drums though they might need additional equipment to do the job properly.

Check the size of the work area

Some workplaces are larger than the others. If you have the luxury of space, then it’s no problem to choose whichever drum handling equipment necessary for your drums. But if your space is tight, you’ll need to look more into your choices. Which equipment doesn’t take a lot of room but still does the job? Consult our representatives to see what your options are.

How far do you go vertically?

Normal drum handling equipment usually covers up to 8 feet high from the ground. Any higher than that, check with us if you could place a special order with your specific needs.

How heavy is the normal load of your drums?

Every drum handling equipment has different capacity that they can handle. Weigh your maximum load and see which equipment fits that.

Assess your drum storage need

How would you like to store your drums? You can choose static drum storage or mobile one if you need to move it around a lot. Then if you often pour content from the storage, drum cradle or dispensing shelf could make a great storage. Check your options here and see yourself which one is best for your plant.

How much power do you need to work on your drums?

Bigger power drum handling equipments can deliver faster for big drums. But for small barrels, this could be a wasted resource. Choosing the correct equipments for your barrels from the beginning could save you a lot of money and maintenance fee in the future.

Drum handling equipment could be an easy answer for your plant needs. Choose it wisely and save your company’s money and time to best deliver your products.

Video of the Week: How to Make Wine from Grapes

Are you interested in making your own wine but don't know yet how to do it? This video will help you in your first attempt. As you get better and you want to produce more wine, this Winemaking App for iPad and our Stainless Steel Wine Barrels should cover that stage. Check it out.

How-To Things with Steel Barrel

There are so many things you can do with used steel barrels. If you put the right mind, use the right tools and come up with the right idea, you may end up inventing a cool new thing made of steel drum; like the ones we are listing below. If you are interested in trying to get your hand on creating stuffs out of steel barrels, these DIY articles are worth trying.

Smokin’ Barrel

Imagine the endless possibilities of smoked foods you can do just right at your backyard with this homemade smokin’ barrel. Smoked salmon, smoked ham, smoked anything, really. Follow the step-by-step guide written by JD here and have a good try on having your own smokin’ barrel.

Steel Barrel Grill

What about the grill? We can make a grill out of 55 gallon steel drum, can’t we? Yes, we can. Check out how to do it here and see if you can give it a try.

Steel Barrel Seat

Although there is no instruction for this photo I’m linking here, it shouldn’t be that hard to figure out how to make this steel barrel seat. How neat does it look? Source: http://www.freshdesignblog.com/2011/03/unusual-metal-beer-barrel-seat/

Steel Drum Instrument from Used Steel Barrel

For making a steel drum (musical) instrument, you will need to be into the music itself and know how to tune the drum once it’s heat tempered and chromed. Now with the available more modern tools than shown in the video, making the drum instrument should be a little easier. Here is a written version of making the musical drum instrument and this Steel Pan Tuning book is offered for free to help you tune your drum.

So which project will you start first for your used steel drum?

Less Bottled Water, More Tap Water

Did you know that around 50 billion bottles of mineral water were consumed annually in the United States (and 200 billion bottles around the world)? That makes it the second most often consumed beverage after (unfortunately) soda water. Are you one of those who are convinced that bottled water is better than tap water? Then you should read on.

Bottled water isn’t always pure

Beyond the fancy labels of bottled water and the sweet terminology used to market bottled waters, they’re not necessarily pure. The Natural Resources Defense Council found that among 1000 bottled water they tested, 22 brands contained chemical contaminants above the state health limit. So even when the bottled water label states that it’s “Natural” or “Pure”, it isn’t always necessarily so.

Little difference in taste

A study held in 2010 actually proves that there is only little difference in taste between bottled water and tap water. The test participants were given six different bottled waters and six types of tap water. The result showed that the participants preferred medium mineralization; characterized by its tasteless and cooler factors. In this case, tap water and bottled water have very little difference in taste.

Some bottled waters come from tap water anyway

About 25 per cent of bottled waters come from tap water which is purified and given some added minerals. A couple of examples include Dasani and Aquafina.

Less bottled water means less bottle wastes, naturally

By drinking tap water, we eliminate the chance of adding more PET bottles in the landfills. About 90% of the consumed PET bottles from bottled water end up in the landfills, instead of being reused or recycled. These bottles could spend at least 400 years until they are finally decomposed! Drinking less bottled water lessens the chance of the landfills getting more and more plastic that is hard to decay. If we reduce the bottled water consumption, we automatically reduce the production of the plastic bottles. That means less crude oil used to make them.

Do you drink more bottled water than tap water? After reading this article, hopefully you’ll drink more tap water and less bottled water. And even if you do have to drink from bottled water, reusing the empty plastic bottles creatively gives a second life to the bottles. Let’s help save the environment!

Teaching Kids to Recycle

Education is best started early. The earlier we can make our kids aware of the importance of recycling, the better future we are looking into. Many schools have begun introducing recycle to the young students. It is even more ideal if parents can be more actively supportive to this by training kids to put the right waste to the right bin. For this you’ll first need to provide different bins for different wastes. Then you need to train your children which wastes are best to put where. Plastic wastes such as milk jugs and soda bottles to the plastic bins and paper wastes to the paper bins and so on.

And what’s a better education than giving them fun games to play? We are so lucky we are in the internet era where finding such games is super easy. Check out some links below containing of cool kids recycling games. Accompany them while they’re playing and assist them when they have difficulties. Then get them to apply that in real life.

National Geographic recycle roundup game

Help Gus the Gorilla place the right wastes to the right bins at the park. Some can be recycled, some cannot, and some can be composted. Go through this first stage with your child, then let him or her play on her own to get used to it.

Rubbish challenge

Drag the wastes to the right boxes.

Clean-Air-Kids hangman

The classic hangman game, only with recycle-related words.

Recycle Bingo

Print this PDF file and let the kids play Recycle Bingo with you or with their friends.

Michael, Michael Go Recycle

Move Michael with the arrow buttons to collect and drop the wastes to the right bins. Then get the other kids who throw garbage away in the park and turn them into eco friendly friends.

So, do you think those could work for your kids to teach them early awareness of recycling? Then you should really begin the activities now and enjoy the result later!

Decorative Bucket Ideas

There is no reason that highly functional buckets shouldn't look attractive. As a matter of fact, we tend to enjoy something more when it's appealing to our eyes. So, if you happen to run out of weekend project ideas, these are some decorative bucket ideas that may catch your interest and act as a good time-filler in your spare time.

Chalkboard Bucket Gift

The Tidy Nest had this idea to buy a low cost tin pail, sprayed it with chalkboard paint, wrote something on it and sweetened it with a ribbon before filling it with gifts. Why not copy this idea with your own touch?

Remote Control Bucket

Decorate your bucket and dump the many remote controls you have at home. This way you won't have to always try to find where one specific remote control is. That is of course if you put the remote control back to the bucket. :-) If you don't feel like decorating the bucket yourself, the Vittles Vaults are nice ready-made decorative buckets to use.

Kids' Toys Bucket Rack

The breadedEscalope designed this super cute toys bucket rack. Perhaps an idea to make a similar thing with your buckets at home?

Garden Tools Bucket Organizer

If you like sewing, this organizer placed in and over a 5 gallon bucket may be a good idea. (photo source: Fixars)

Decorative Halloween Bucket

Boo! Make these decorative Halloween buckets just before the season comes. They'll surely be a hit! (Source: http://studiobcreativejuice.blogspot.com/2010/10/office-holiday-decorating.html)

Bucket Ottoman

Killer B. Designs has this genius idea to make a great use of used buckets! Isn't the Ottoman looking absolutely gorgeous? 

Bucket Storage

Even untouched metal pails can look superb when treated right. Hanging these pails with colorful contents against contrasting wall makes them lovely and eye-catching. Source: Jetruth

Decorative Flower Bucket

Can you believe this attractive pot used to be a paint bucket? Just cover it with decorative paper or gift wrap, and you'll have a nice flower pot for the house! Source: Better Homes and Gardens

Pails are easy to find and also low cost. The projects above should cost you almost nothing and you'll feel like you've achieved so much when it's completed. So why not give it a try?

The Cardboard Issue: How to Recycle Pizza Box

Some of you may have known that using things made of cardboard, such as fiber drums, shipping cardboard boxes, etc., is a good thing to do since cardboard is recyclable. However, it is a different case for a cardboard packaging that is contaminated with greasy food products, like pizza box. The oil stuck on the pizza box will actually ruin the whole recycling process since recycling paper products normally includes mixing the recycled items with water. And we all know water is never oil’s best friend. This only concludes one thing: greasy cardboard is not recyclable.

That leaves to a question: should we just throw away the pizza box as soon as we’re done eating the food?

We don’t necessarily have to. You see, it’s the part that is greasy that is unrecyclable. The rest is acceptable for recycling. So what we can do is to tear off the contaminated part, keep the clean one, collect these recyclable clean cardboard boxes and send them off to the recycling curb for further processing. Please don’t cheat by slipping one greasy cardboard into the piles as this will ruin the whole batch.

Have you recycled your pizza boxes today?

Winemaking with Stainless Steel Wine Barrels Needs This iPad Winemaking App

Winemaker enthusiasts, both the novice and the expert, could appreciate the role of the Stainless Steel Wine Barrel in the process of winemaking. Not only does the barrel has a better longevity compared to the traditional oak barrels, but the stainless steel wine barrel also offers shorter amount of time needed for making wine. Therefore, winemaking using the stainless steel wine barrels is without doubt more economical than the oak barrels. However, as one gets more focused on winemaking and production increases, it’s not easy to catch up with all the paperwork and the record needed to keep up with the batches and other data that each stainless steel wine barrel has. Fortunately, there is an iPad App to help us with it!

Winemaking app is a new application for iPad users developed by Tamarac. It aims to help the winemakers keeping track with the batches of wine they are making with only a simple, one-stop shop iPad. Now winemakers can ditch all the traditional pen and paper journal, which sometimes could be quite a pain if they ever lose it, and replace them instead with this Winemaking iPad app.

Winemaking also includes conversions and calculations commonly used in the winemaking process, like volumes, temperatures, SO2 additions, sugar adjustments, etc. One can input various data such as description, varietal, etc. and if they ever need to calculate results of wine blends, they can do so with the blending calculator of this smart app. That function will definitely help a great deal if you like experimenting with wine blending.

For new winemakers, the app has preliminary step-by-step guidelines for making both red wines and white wines. These guidelines contain minimal required equipment list (perfect for first timers who try new type of wine for the first time) and full required equipment list (for normal winemaking).

Winemaking can never be easier now.